D. Leavis has seen in Lady Susan a forerunner of Mary Crawford, and the suggestion is interesting: both are Londoners, both have more head than heart, both allow their tongues to run away with them, both have moved in ‘fast’ circles. Certainly, when I first read Lady Susan, at much the same age as Jane Austen was when she wrote it, I felt a sense of admiration for her – admiration for her worldliness, intelligence and vitality. She is Machiavellian, but there is an attractive quality to her plotting: one can hardly blame her for wanting to outwit her jealous sister-in-law, and for wanting to make Reginald de Courcy fall in love with her. ‘There is exquisite pleasure in subduing an insolent spirit,’ she says, ‘in making a person pre-determined to dislike, acknowledge one’s superiority.’ On one level, this is nothing worse than an outspoken Elizabeth Bennet, taking satisfaction from Darcy’s change of heart. It is certainly nothing like as bad as the melodramatic plottings and seductions of Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses, which may also lie behind the plot of the novel. Lady Susan is sexually confident, unashamed of her selfishness, and one could argue that some of her more unfeeling remarks (like Mary Crawford’s) are merely jokes made for effect – she does not really wish that her friend’s tiresome husband should be carried off by the gout, nor that her friend should kill her lover’s wife by worrying her into a decline.

The case that Jane Austen was a frustrated wit, forced by a changing society to admire quietude and virtue against the grain of her own nature, has been forcefully and sympathetically argued by feminist critics. But this case presents its own difficulties. It is hard to question some of Austen’s expressed dislike of aspects of the worldly life. She disliked London and most of what it represented, and there is no envy in her portrait of Mary Crawford’s childhood or Lady Susan’s apartment in Upper Seymour Street. She herself fainted, like an old-fashioned heroine, when told that her family was to move from the country to Bath. When Lady Susan says ‘I take town in my way to that insupportable spot, a country village,’ she is condemning herself out of her own mouth, for there can be no doubt that Jane Austen herself loved the country and its virtues. In Mansfield Park, she has written a wonderfully complex novel about the tension between the two impulses – the witty and the good, the town and the country, the sophisticated and the simple – and has nobly allowed the reader to infer, from the structure of her characters, that only the slightly under-sexed can be truly good. It is not a simple issue, and she does not take sides simply. It could be argued that she could not have written so well of a Lady Susan had she not had a repressed impulse to malice in her, and certainly in her letters there are sparks of a far from charitable wit, such as she would never have allowed her ‘good’ heroines, and for which Emma would certainly have been reprimanded by Mr Knightley. Did she, like Emma, find it difficult to control her sharp tongue in public, and did she find pleasure in expressing her worst thoughts through other characters? Did she find people like the de Courcies and the Vernons self-important and dull?

The problem with Lady Susan is its lack of balance. The eponymous protagonist has all the best lines, and runs away with the novel. In Mansfield Park and Emma, the tension is so perfectly judged that one remark from either faction can shake one’s faith or sway one’s sympathy. Frank Churchill is at times so amusing, the Bates at times so appalling, Fanny at times so dull, Henry and Mary Crawford at times so delightful, that one’s mind is kept in a perpetual unrest, a perpetual re-assessment of the central issues. But in Lady Susan, the opposition is dull. Frederica, the besieged daughter, is allowed to write only one letter of her own: she spends the rest of the time weeping or playing the pianoforte. Reginald de Courcy is gullible, the deceived wife, Mrs Manwaring, is thin and ugly, the sister-in-law, Mrs Vernon, is motivated against Lady Susan by obvious sexual jealousy. There is no acceptable positive world to set up against Lady Susan’s corrupt one: Churchill, the home of the Venions, has none of the reality or happiness of Mansfield Park or Highbury. The choice, a not particularly attractive one, is between an eighteenth-century London where wives deceive their husbands whenever possible and laugh about it with their friends, and a dull country house full of unidentified children. There is, even in the convention’s own terms, no Clarissa to set against the dashing Lovelace. It was very much the vogue to admire Lovelace, despite Richardson’s avowed intentions: we see how much Jane Austen herself disapproved of such admiration in Sanditon. She should have seen that Lady Susan was bound to appear more attractive in the absence of an effective counter-balance.

One cannot leave Lady Susan without a word of regret. What a pity it is that she never, in her mature work, returned to the subject of a handsome thirty-five-year-old widow. What scope there would have been, what choices offered. Perhaps one should be grateful that she attempted it at the age of twenty, before she decided she could not or should not handle such a theme.